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Facebook has introduced a new featured in its iOS app and on the web called Find Friends Nearby, a tool to enable you to locate people you know nearby, notesTechCrunch. Facebook engineer Ryan Patterson created the app–he responded in the comments to clarify the feature and remarked the it was initially named ‘Friendshake’:

I built Find Friends Nearby with another engineer for a hackathon project. While it was originally called ‘Friendshake’, we settled on ‘Find Friends Nearby’ for launch (the URL was a little bit of a homage to the previous iteration).

For me, the ideal use case for this product is the one where when you’re out with a group of people whom you’ve recently met and want to stay in contact with. Facebook search might be effective, or sharing your vanity addresses or business cards, but this tool provides a really easy way to exchange contact information with multiple people with minimal friction.

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Not sure what use it is if it only works with friends who currently have the page open. People aren’t likely to keep the page open, particularly when you have to click through five steps to get to the page inside the app.

For me it asks to use my location and then shows the spinner to indicate it’s busy indefinitely.

I think the idea is to quickly add people that aren’t yet in your Facebook friends list, if you happen to see them somewhere and want to exchange contact information. Seems pretty niche-use to me.

If that’s the case, then the only thing about it that reminds me of Apple’s Find My Friends app is the name, as Find My Friends is purely about locating your friends on a map, not gathering contact information from people nearby. This reminds me a lot more of Bump. Maybe I’m reading things wrong though.